


there's a dead silence where the wind-chimes hung

by lepidopteran



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, First Kiss, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Past Character Death, Post-Canon, arguably hurt/comfort but ed's idea of comfort is questionable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-05-10 07:00:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14732150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lepidopteran/pseuds/lepidopteran
Summary: Ling stands at the sidelines, and sees recovery. Healing. Rebuilding. He looks and looks for grief, but doesn’t find it.





	there's a dead silence where the wind-chimes hung

A lot of people are in hospital beds.

It’s at the point where Alphonse and Mustang’s rooms, in particular, are more like social halls than medical facilities. Well-wishers throng around Al, with gifts to give and tears to shed, while the Colonel is beset by visitors with more political motives.

Ling stands at the sidelines, and sees recovery. Healing. Rebuilding. He looks and looks for grief, but doesn’t find it.

He sees a country stepping -- bloodied, but no less hopeful -- into a better future. And even after all this, Ling isn’t naive enough to think that he’ll be part of that future. He’s not part of that country.

The train across the desert is down for repairs with no fixed deadline. Unsurprising, considering the devastation the past week’s events wrought on the global economy. Ling spends most of his time holed up in a hotel room, writing all the necessary diplomatic letters. A convoy will arrive in two or three weeks to bear them back to Xing.

“Them” being him, Lan Fan, and Mei. It’s strange, after all this time, to find himself isolated to this “them,” this trio of foreigners. It’s as if all the ties they formed were cut, without warning, leaving them nothing more than exiles waiting helplessly to return to their homeland.

The three of them speak to each other little. Ling wants to be a big brother to Mei, but the gap cleft by years of political conflict proves a hard one to bridge. They’re both well aware that his gesture of friendship is also one of mercy, one that will save her family from certain ruin. He finds himself uncomfortable with her constant expressions of gratitude, and he can sense her own discomfort beyond them.

As for Lan Fan, she and Ling were never much for extended conversations. Their mutual devotion rarely required words. Fu was a confidant for them both, and in his absence, the silence is suddenly unbearable.

His loss is unspeakable, and Ling comes to avoid looking Lan Fan in the eye, frightened of her glassy, vacant stare. He knows he must look no better.

A lot of people are in hospital beds, and Ling isn’t.

Is it bad that he wishes he were? Mustang is blinded, Alphonse so weak he can’t stand. More than a hundred injured soldiers and bystanders keep Central Hospital’s nurses busy around the clock.

Edward spends functionally 100% of his time at his brother’s bedside, sleeping and eating there. His face has taken on a new look, grave but peaceful. It would seem uncharacteristic, if it didn’t fit so well. The great battle of his young life has at last been put to rest.

It makes Ling feel sick to watch the two of them.

He hovers in the hall outside, sometimes. Like it or not, the hospital is now a hub for the proceedings of the Amestrian government, and like it or not, Ling has landed himself at the center of Amestrian foreign affairs.

So after a strained, though not antagonistic, visit to Mustang, he’ll often find himself passing by a half-open door. A matched pair of golden heads will catch his eye. And for a minute or two he’ll stand and try to catch a fragment of conversation, a laugh, or a line from a book read aloud.

He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. The feeling he’s left with is something not quite like jealousy.

*

_The first few days, he can't stop talking to himself. Asking questions, pointing out strange or amusing sights, making speculations. Trying to start a conversation, out of habit._

_The worst part is how long he'll wait for a reply._

*

“You gonna just lurk around like a creep-o, or say hi?”

Edward’s voice is too loud, already too close as he crosses the room in a couple of steady strides, leans against the door frame like he’s always been this cool and collected.

Alphonse has called out to Ling before, glimpsing him in the hall, and Ling has always made his excuses, insisted that he was on his way to some _very_ important meeting, always heavily implied that the future of geopolitics rested in his hands and so, terribly sorry, but he really must be going.

This time, he’s caught out. He lingered a little too long, enchanted by the disconcertingly bucolic scene of brotherly love, and now he’s trapped under Ed’s ferocious stare.

Past him, Alphonse is sitting up in bed, bright-eyed. He looks better every day. Ling has overheard, in the inordinately cheery chit-chat that pervades this place, that in only a week his health has improved in leaps and bounds. Ling expected nothing less of the relentlessly optimistic boy he knows. Knew? Thought he knew.

Everything seems past tense, these days.

Al’s voice is stronger and less gravelled when he calls out, “Is that Ling? Please come in!”

Edward is giving him a _look_ that he can’t quite interpret. His best guess would be, _upset my brother and you’ll be sorry._

It’s not that Ling has been avoiding close quarters with Alphonse. But who wouldn’t feel a little disconcerted, if someone they knew only as a disembodied voice in a suit of armor suddenly reappeared in the form of a teenage boy? A remarkably normal teenage boy.

Up close, it’s impossible to ignore the sunken shadows around Alphonse’s eyes, his thin and brittle hair. Ling remembers what it was like to lose control of his own body for a short time. He can’t imagine how it would feel to be severed from it completely, to live without it for years.

Because after everything, Ling feels closer to his body than he ever did before. There’s nothing like sharing a house to make it really feel like home.

Al’s cheerful smile brightens his wan face, and he pats the end of the bed, gesturing for Ling to sit. He remains standing, says, “I can’t stay long.”

“Oh, yeah,” Ed says, throwing himself back into his chair. At this point, the leather seat has a permanent Edward-shaped indent, complete with dimpled imprints of the bolts in his automail leg. “I’m sure you have a _very important meeting_ , right?” His voice is unmistakably accusatory, and Alphonse throws him a warning stare.

Ling looks into those gold eyes, and he tries to get angry. All he can feel is exhaustion. “No,” he says. “I just can’t stay.”

Ed opens his mouth to argue, but Alphonse quickly jumps in, “That’s alright. It’s nice to see you, Ling.”

He stays for as long as he can put words in a row, smile, make eye contact. As he’s about to leave, Al says, “I was sorry to hear about your loss.”

Ling hesitates, waiting to hear more, because if anyone would understand it would be --

But Alphonse goes on, “I know you and Fu were very close.”

Ling forces out some words of thanks, and gets out of there as fast as he can. He swears he can feel Ed’s eyes on his back, all the way down the hall.

*

_The cremation ground outside the city is a bleak and hollow place, paved with stone and lined with yew trees. Ling is told that in Amestris, these are symbolic of death. He can see why. They stand like the stiff spines of corpses, evergreen needles barely moving in the wind._

_Lately it seems that the wind follows Ling wherever he goes._

_Lan Fan stands so close to the pyre that gray soot specks her white mourning garments. Her shirt is sleeveless, baring her automail arm, polished to a shine._

_Ling steps back after he throws his offerings onto the flames. He watches black and red cinders rise into the blindingly blue sky, and turns away from the memory that sight brings._

_They stand and watch in silence until the sky darkens and the flames consume the last of Fu’s body, leaving a small pile of white ash that Lan Fan scrapes into a beautifully painted ceramic pot. She clutches it to her chest the whole walk back to the hotel. Her face is blank, her steps even and silent._

_Ling hates knowing what Lan Fan’s weeping sounds like._

_It wakes him every night, and he lies in the dark and listens, careful not to turn over or shift. He’s sure her senses are acute enough that she can tell he’s not asleep. But it’s the pretense of privacy that matters._

_He hates hearing her weep, and feeling his own grief so dull and distant, more like sullenness than mourning._

_He hates himself for sometimes forgetting who he’s meant to be mourning._  
  
*

The doors of the hospital’s gleaming new elevator are closing behind Ling when something jams them open. A black boot over a steel foot.

Ed pries the doors apart with both hands and, having cornered his prey, snaps out, “What the hell is your problem?”

Ling laughs. In the face of a question like that, it’s hard to do anything else. He can feel the goofy smile take up residence on his face, haunting it like a ghost of his old self, inconsiderate of his current state of mind.

Smiling and laughing is defensive. It is the first and last recourse of Prince Ling of the Yao clan. Smiling and laughing says, I’m not troubled. I’m not worried. You can threaten my life, my title, my family. I’ll smile and laugh and order another round of drinks, because nothing can touch me.

“Going somewhere?” Ling asks, gesturing at the array of numbered buttons that direct the elevator.

“No, I’m just here to hassle you,” Ed spits, and Ling honestly can’t tell if it’s sarcasm or not. But Ed punches the button marked Fl. 3, possibly at random.

“Goody,” says Ling.

The elevator sinks, floor by floor. Edward has very little concept of personal space. He had pancakes for breakfast this morning. Ling knows this because he can smell the maple syrup on Ed’s breath when he says, “Answer me, jackass. What’s wrong with you?”

 _Oh, you have no idea_.

“I’m in perfect health,” Ling says. “Thanks for your concern.”

Ed makes that tiny frustrated sound, that little _huff_ , the one he always makes when something isn’t going his way. Which, Ling realizes, is often. That’s something they always had in common.

“You’re acting weird,” Ed says. “Different.”

“Different than …?” Ling prompts. The question needles him. Different than when he was a superpowered, near-immortal being? Different than when they were in the middle of a fight for the lives of tens of thousands of people?

Is he supposed to go back to who he was, before the Promised Day, before the Stone, before even Edward, when he first arrived in Amestris? Or to return to who he was before he crossed the desert? He knows that now he is expected to be one thing, and one thing only: Emperor.

Edward has never seemed to understand that.

The elevator stutters to a stop at the third floor. Its chime sounds, tinny and sharp, and the grate slides open. Before he lets the doors close behind him, Ed says, “You’re treating us like you’ve forgotten we’re your friends.”

At the same time, Ling says, “Have a nice day.” Flat and automatic.

Before the doors slam shut, he just has time to see the answering look in Ed’s eyes. The gold is dimmed and shadowed, like the dark cast of the brass elevator grate, or the sun seen past a smoking crater, its light dulled.

*

_The night after the Promised Day, he sleeps in a warm featherbed with soft white sheets. He lies there in the dark and listens to the resounding silence within him. There is a hard line, now, between the sounds of the night -- the bark of dogs and rumble of traffic as the city crawls its way back into order -- and the soundless cavern of his own self. He can feel the space of his loneliness as a margin between himself and the world._

_He falls asleep praying to wake up somehow restored. To return to a time when he couldn’t sense that distance, when friendship was a pursuit outside of himself, and not the nature of his being._

_He remembers himself as another person, as one would remember an old friend in the hazy glow of long-ago memory: too bright to be real. He remembers himself as someone lost and longed for, and he falls asleep with his own name on his lips, as if spoken by someone else. It’s a chime in a silent room, and a bright spirit in the dark._

_Ling._

*

The hospital is on a wide boulevard at a four-way intersection. Sometimes it feels like there are more cars on one block in Central than in the entire province in Xing where Ling grew up.

He leans against the sturdy brick facade of the massive building, and lets the sound of traffic overwhelm him. When his eyes slide closed, he sees a swirl of red and black, and imagines that the drone he hears is not passing cars but a thousand groaning souls.

This is why Ling deserves a hospital bed: he must be sick. It’s sick that he misses that sound.

Past the roar he makes out a single voice, cursing: “Holy fucking shit it’s cold. I don’t know the last time I went outside.”

When Ling opens his eyes, Edward is close enough beside him that all Ling can see is the top of his golden head, resting against the wall. The color of his hair is brighter than Ling has ever seen it before, now that he has the luxury of hospital showers to keep it clean.

“Gimme your coat.”

“What?”

Ed tugs on his sleeve. “You run warm, right? Used to always go around without a shirt. Drove me nuts.”

He can’t bring himself to ask what that means. Ed gives a little shiver that’s definitely exaggerated and might be entirely phony, but Ling is already shrugging off the long black trench.

It’s almost comically big on Ed, and when he turns up the collar and hunkers down, half his face is obscured. “Come on,” he says.

There’s nothing to do but follow. After all, Ed has his coat.

*

_In the bloody cavern of Gluttony’s guts, Edward shook with hunger towards the end. Ling knows now that he was eating for two. His own stomach had ached with emptiness, even after the boot. But Ed started to turn gray._

_When Ling insisted that they sit and rest, Ed groused and griped. But gradually he crept closer to Ling, until he finally said, “Fuckin’ cold,” and rolled over so their sides pressed flush together. His waist nested against Ling’s hip._

_Ling could feel the tremors rattle his ribs, until one or the other of them fell asleep._

_When he woke, the warmth was gone. Ed had turned on his side with his back to Ling. His shoulders trembled violently._

*

The courtyard of Central Command is silent and deserted. Under different circumstances, it could almost be called peaceful. A wind rustles the pennants.

Edward looks shockingly tiny beside the crater in the pavement. Ling doesn’t tell him so. Ed stands with his hands in his pockets, and his head tilted back. Away from the ground, up to the sky.

Every part of Ling screams to be somewhere else.

Ed tilts his head down. Only his eyes are visible over the coat-collar, still turned up against the cold. “Take my hand,” he says.

He holds it out. The right one. His flesh and blood right hand. Ling can’t move; he feels slow and stupid. He wishes there was someone else to move for him -- move his hands, his feet, his heart.

“Idiot,” Ed huffs. He grabs Ling’s left hand with his own left hand, and closes Ling’s fingers around his right. “There. Damn, your hand is warm. Do you know how weird that is? To feel something where you felt nothing for years?”

Ling doesn’t want to hear this. His friend has achieved everything he’s fought for, and Ling can’t stand to hear another word about it.

“You must be happy,” he says.

Ed tugs his hand loose from Ling’s grip and stares at his palm. “I went around feeling broken for so long. Like my body wasn’t my body, it was something foreign, and fragmentary, and temporary. And _my_ body, my _real_ body, was estranged from me. All I could think about was how bad I wanted to get it back. When I moved my arm, all I could think about was how it wasn’t _really_ my arm.”

He takes a deep breath, and the wind picks up. Ling can feel the tie coming loose from his hair, but he can’t look away from Ed.

“I was so fucking stupid, see? ‘Cause now I have the damn thing back, and I don’t want it.” He holds the arm out in front of him, and gives it a little wiggle that almost makes Ling laugh.  
  
Then he turns, just a quarter turn, so Ling can see the knowing glint in his eyes. “Because it’s not mine.

“What are you talking about?” Ling says. He feels almost frightened, of what he doesn’t know -- of Edward, of the barren courtyard, the immense crater, the endless capacity of his own body --

“You don’t miss him,” Ed says. “You think you do, but you don’t. It would be like missing your right arm, but not the right arm you were born with. The prosthetic you were never supposed to have. Because sometimes what you’re supposed to be -- isn’t what you’re meant to be. Do you get what I’m saying here?”

Ling doesn’t answer right away. He looks out across the crater, at the stately capitol building. In the distance, a small entourage makes its way out the front door, probably accompanying some minor dignitary on an errand to Grumman. Ling wants to be anywhere else. He wants to talk to anyone else about anything else.

“It’s not the same at all,” he says.

Ed huffs. “I never said it was. Goddamn, why do I even try?”

Ling fidgets with a lock of hair. It’s hanging loose, spilling over his shoulders and blowing into his eyes, the ribbon irretrievably lost. Not one strand of Ed’s braid has shifted. “I really don’t know.”

Ling’s hair falls like a curtain across the side of his face, and he takes cover behind it now to study Ed surreptitiously. He looks too calm, as the Ed of recent days always does, quiet at his brother’s bedside. Able to sit still like he never was before. He’s more self-possessed now -- that’s what it is. It’s only made him more powerful.

The movement he makes is so deliberate, so unhesitating, that Ling doesn’t see it coming. One minute Ed is an arm’s length away and then he’s right in Ling’s personal space.

He looks up at Ling for a moment, face unreadable, and then tilts his head into the seam that joins the jacket-collar to the shoulder. “It smells like him.”

“Who?” Ling can only smell automail grease and hospital shampoo. He wants it closer.

“Greed,” Ed says.

Something in Ling comes loose and shatters when it falls. He feels hot tears in his mouth, and Ed’s two flesh-and-blood thumbs sliding through the dampness on his cheeks.

“See?” Ed is saying, past the roaring phantom wind that only Ling can hear. “I don’t miss him either.”

Ed’s mouth is warmer than the rest of him, but no softer. When it presses against Ling’s, it’s as much a siege as it is a kiss. It’s a kiss like a gauntlet thrown down, or an earthquake warning on the radio, or like a list of demands brought before a monarch when the tide of a rebellion turns.

Or like a couple of teenagers who have come back from hell, less than intact, but with two good sets of teeth to click together.

The diplomatic retinue passes by them, voices politely lowered. Greed’s coat billows up around their jaws.

Ed says, “I was always happier to see you come back.”

*

The last kiss, in an empty, carpeted hall in Central Hospital, is soft and slow. It’s a gentle kiss, not a usual Edward Elric sort of kiss, and in every press of their lips is the solemn recognition of an inevitable end.

A convoy of Xingese chariots waits on the street below, horses stamping at the paving-stones, gleaming in splendor suited to a crown prince. Lan Fan’s best-loved knives are freshly sharpened.

Ling fists his hand in the collar of Greed’s coat where it hangs on Ed’s shoulders, and at that, Ed disengages his mouth for a moment from Ling’s jaw. “I guess you’ll be wanting this back.”

Ling shrugs, like he doesn’t really care either way, like it hasn’t made a possessive warmth swell in his heart to see Edward wear it these last two weeks. To watch it flare out behind him when he paces up and down the halls, and see him tuck it close around himself when he falls asleep in the chair by his brother’s side.

“Not really,” Ling says mildly. “But if you’re keeping it, you have to promise to get it tailored.”

“Hey now, Emperor,” Ed says, tipping back a little on his heels to meet Ling’s eyes. “Call me small again, and I’ll cause a diplomatic crisis.”

Ling tugs him back in. The inevitable end isn’t here just yet.

*

Ling decides, privately, that there is a reason one body is given only one soul.

It’s because a life isn’t meant for one, or even two. The endless, impossible capacity of the body is meant to be felt in all its emptiness. Because otherwise, how else would there be room for other souls? Not just the souls unmoored and desperate for eyes to see and hands to touch with (or to fight, or kill, or steal with), but also the souls with bodies of their own. The souls seeking to narrow that aching margin of loneliness between the self and the world.

And Ling decides, privately, that souls are meant to wander, and perhaps later to return to someone who feels like home.

He thinks he’ll tell all this to Edward, when they see each other again.

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
> And He Did. 
> 
> title from 'going to japan' by the mountain goats and i also listened to 'woke up new' a lot while i was writing this. predictable. you can listen too if you would like to cry
> 
> please also note that the name ling can be written in chinese characters as 灵 (spirit, soul) or 铃 (bell, chime). i'm playing with words here. i love to have a fun time with language


End file.
